In the history of the medieval nunneries of England there is nothing more striking than the constant financial straits to which they were reduced. Professor Savine's analysis of the _Valor Ecclesiasticus_ has shown that in 1535 the nunneries were on an average only half as rich as the men's houses, while the average number of religious persons in them was larger[442]; and yet it is clear from the evidence of visitation documents that even the men's houses were continually in debt. It is therefore not to be wondered at that there was hardly a nunnery in England, which did not at one time or another complain of poverty. These financial difficulties had already begun before the end of the thirteenth century and they grew steadily worse until the moment of the Dissolution. The worst sufferers of all were the nunneries of Yorkshire and the North, a prey to the inroads of the Scots, who time after time pillaged their lands and sometimes dispersed their inmates; Yorkshire was full of nunneries and almost all of them were miserably poor. But in other parts of the country, without any such special cause, the position was little better. When Bishop Alnwick visited the diocese of Lincoln in the first half of the fifteenth century, fourteen out of the twenty-five houses which he examined were in financial difficulties. Moreover not only is this true of small houses, inadequately endowed from their foundation and less likely to weather bad times, but the largest and richest houses frequently complained of insufficient means. It is easy to understand the distress of the poor nuns of Rothwell; their founder Richard, Earl of Gloucester, had died before properly endowing the house, and the prioress and convent could expend for their food and clothing only four marks and the produce of four fields of land, in one of which the house was situated[443]. But it is less easy to account for the constant straits of the great Abbey of Shaftesbury, which had such vast endowments that a popular saying had arisen: "If the Abbot of Glastonbury could marry the Abbess of Shaftesbury, their heir would hold more land than the King of England"[444]. It is comprehensible that the small houses of Lincolnshire and the dangerously situated houses of Yorkshire should be in difficulties; but their complaints are not more piteous than those of Romsey, Godstow and Barking, richly endowed nunneries, to which the greatest ladies of the land did not disdain to retire.